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Jan 11, 2017
This week’s theme
Words that appear rude, but aren’t

This week’s words
cockup
crapulous
pricket
fard
cunctation

pricket
Pricket 1
Photo: Walters Art Museum/Wikimedia

pricket
Pricket 2

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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

pricket

PRONUNCIATION:
(PRIK-it)

MEANING:
noun:1. A sharp point or spike for holding a candle.
 2. A male deer in its second year, before the antlers have branched.

ETYMOLOGY:
Diminutive of prick/prik, from Old English prica (point). Earliest documented use: 1331.

USAGE:
“These first candlesticks probably were no more than hollowed-out wood or stone, unembellished, or some sort of crude pricket.”
Candelight Adds Special Warmth to Any Meal; Chicago Sun-Times; Oct 23, 1988.

“The years passed and each year McCarricker made it a point to locate the now full-grown stag who had had a forked antler when he was only a pricket and now carried great antlers.”
John Joseph Mathews; Old Three Toes and Other Tales of Survival and Extinction; University of Oklahoma Press; 2015.

See more usage examples of pricket in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. -William James, psychologist and philosopher (11 Jan 1842-1910)

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